Review- Tremors 5: Bloodlines

Directed by: Don Michael Paul

Written by: Woodrow Truesmith, M.A Deuce, C.J Strebor

Starring: Michael Gross, Jamie Kennedy, Pearl Thusi

Synopsis: Survivalist Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) and his new sidekick Travis (Jamie Kennedy) are hired to track down an ass-blaster terrorizing South Africa. As they engage in battles with the aggressive creatures, they discover an even more lethal creature.

Tremors is one of the most popular B movie franchises in existence. The original Tremors came out in 1996 and was a pretty competent monster flick that became a cult classic. I genuinely love the original and not in any ironic or 'so bad it's good' way. Tremors II: Aftershocks, while much more B movie in nature, has enough charm to make it watchable and fun. I don't much care for Tremors III: Back to Perfection and the introduction or the Ass-Blasters (creatures that literally fart to fly), and while I think the concepts in Tremors 4: The Legend Begins are neat, it fails too. The last two lacked the charm of the first two, shamelessly B-ish.

Tremors 5: Bloodlines feels the most like a B movie. The series has no charm left and this comes off as an attempt to cash in on the SyFy channel bad movie craze that began with Sharknado (and, according to Michael Gross, that was the reason it got made). But it's also not as intentionally dumb as something like Sharknado because it doesn't try to be ironically bad enough to genuinely funny. When there are serious moments in the movie, it seems to try to take itself more seriously than it should. That makes a large portion of this movie unintentionally funny and unintentionally bad.

There's no point in telling you everything wrong with it, you have to be able to let some things go with these types of movies. I'll keep it to the big problems. The first, and the most picky, is that the two main plot points of the movie are introduced incredibly lazily; Burt Gummer is in the desert doing his thing, the new character Travis Welker finds him and convinces him to work with him within seconds, and then directly after that while still in the desert, another guy comes in and hires them to go to South Africa. The whole plot is given to you in the first few minutes of the movie. Again, that complaint is picky considering what the movie is, but it bothered me. The second  is a female character named Dr. Nandi Montabu, who starts randomly carrying a bow and arrow around and acts be like Katness from The Hunger Games. It's probably the most hilarious aspect of the movie, but it's so hilarious that it's irritating. The third is the redesign of the Graboid and Ass-Blaster. Part of the fun of the series is seeing what new Graboid-related creatures they can come up with and seeing what cool new designs they have, but replacing the designs of the classic Graboid and the Ass-Blaster was a mistake. The redesigns are too wormy and overall generic looking. They're not terrible, I suppose, but far from an improvement. The fourth is the whole ending, which has obvious foreshadowing at the beginning of the movie and makes absolutely zero sense. There was lightning, Dr. Nandi shot a fiery arrow into the clouds,  lightning struck the dirt and metal coils, and a Graboid egg exploded. I don't know what the hell it was and I'm not sure what the writer was going for there.

There are a few positives of the movie though. It's always fun to see Burt Gummer return, Michael Gross has always played the character well. For its budget, the CGI was very good. There are some references to Jurassic Park and a few shots that were inspired by the original three Tremors movie, which I thought were clever. The whole premise and setting was neat as well. It's competently shot with competent visual effects and competent acting, which are things you don't always get for these kinds of movies.

I'm curious what they'll do next with this series. Did the ending imply a TV show of Burt Gummer and Travis Welker going around hunting monsters? I might be interested in that. I think it would be cool if they introduced new creatures. Something that eats the Graboids? Underwater Graboids? Graboids with drills on their heads that can invade a city? There's a lot of potential with Tremors and because it's a B movie series that's not attempting to stay grounded in reality, all doors are open. As for this one, I recommend this only to people who are Tremors fans or people who enjoy B movies.

3/10